The march lasted several days.
Days that stopped being measured by the sun and began to be counted by the weight in their bones, the constant dryness in their throats, and the thickening silence among the survivors.
The column moved through dense forests, mist-covered plains, and trails that seemed to vanish the moment one looked away. The villagers walked with a resilience bordering on inhuman, the confidence of those who had traveled these paths too many times before.
Adrián's group learned to follow them.
Modern clothing was the first problem.
Synthetic fabrics tore on branches, trapped moisture, and burned against the skin with every step. The night cold pierced through them as if they were nothing. It was one of the village women who took the initiative.
Without sharing a single word of language, she began handing out cured hides and thick woven garments, heavy with the scent of smoke and animal fat.
One by one, the group shed their former appearance. Tactical gear, urban clothing, discreet uniforms disappeared beneath layers of leather and handmade cloth. The transformation was gradual. Uncomfortable.
They weren't just adapting to the environment.
They were losing the last visible signs of their world.
Nara was the last to accept the change.
An older woman patiently wrapped her in a soft leather dress reinforced with strips of woven fabric. The garment was functional, warm… and utterly foreign to everything Nara had once been.
When it was done, Nara stared at her reflection in the distorted surface of a nearby stream.
She looked like a child dressed for a tribal festival she had never asked to attend.
The hide hung too loose, the neckline too wide, and an improvised hood slipped awkwardly over her head, hiding rebellious strands of hair.
Adrián watched her for a few seconds… and couldn't help himself.
He pinched both her cheeks.
"You look… different."
Nara froze, processing the gesture, then shot him a glare.
"I am not a pet."
She tried to step away, but the oversized hide caught at her feet. She stumbled slightly, recovering with clumsy indignation—which only made one of the escorts let out a brief, guilty laugh.
The moment lasted no more than a breath.
But it was enough to remind them they were still human.
The bad news arrived days later.
The food was different.
Not just in flavor or texture. It was biologically different: dense grains, meat with a metallic scent, vegetables muted in color but aggressively intense in taste.
At first, they assumed it was cultural adjustment.
Then came the vomiting.
The fever.
The tremors.
Their bodies rejected what they needed to survive.
The first to fall were the elderly villagers. Years of migration had already weakened them; they could not withstand the invisible clash of bacteria and climates. They died quietly, surrounded by families who accepted the loss with a resignation more disturbing than grief.
Adrián's group did not escape unscathed.
The escorts endured better thanks to their conditioning, but several fell ill. Nights turned into improvised vigils—sweat, spasms, and dehydration as real an enemy as any beast.
Of the archaeologists… only one remained.
He sat against a stone wall, staring at his hands as if trying to remember who he had been before crossing the portal. He spoke little. Ate less. His eyes carried the hollow look of someone who had lost too much, too quickly.
Nara watched from a distance.
Seven dead in the village. Two more during the journey.
Her mind no longer memorized names.
Only numbers.
And that terrified her.
Adrián observed everything with an uncomfortable mixture of frustration and calculation.
They couldn't fight unknown bacteria.
They couldn't negotiate with the biology of a foreign world.
They couldn't shoot evolutionary incompatibility.
For the first time, his money, influence, resources… meant nothing.
This world did not respond to human hierarchies.
It responded to endurance.
To adaptation.
Or to death.
One night, beneath rough blankets in a makeshift shelter, Nara sat beside him, wrapped in leather still too large for her.
"Do you think we'll survive here?" she asked quietly.
Adrián took his time answering. He watched the distant settlement fires, the shadows moving beyond the improvised walls.
"I think…" he said at last, "if we don't learn to live like they do, we won't survive at all."
Nara hugged her knees.
"I miss stupid things," she murmured. "Coffee. Electricity. Phone signal…"
Adrián didn't smile.
He missed them too.
He began adapting before the others.
There were no ceremonies. No formal lessons. He didn't study the language.
He survived it.
Words came fragmented, repeated under pressure: food, danger, road, debt, shelter. He memorized them like emergency exits. Tried them softly, then firmly… and sometimes failed.
Once, he confused shelter with confinement. The gesture he made alongside it was misread. For several seconds, the silence thickened, hands tightening on weapons.
He did not make the same mistake twice.
Every correct word prevented a problem.
Every mistake could cost blood.
Thanks to his natural ear for languages—a skill that had opened doors and salvaged impossible negotiations in his world—he began recognizing patterns in the city dwellers' speech: food, danger, trade, debt, rest.
At first he earned confused stares.
Then slight nods.
Eventually, rudimentary exchanges—enough to secure basic supplies, understand warnings, and avoid unnecessary conflict.
Small progress.
But real.
Nara, however, was not adapting the same way.
She stayed close to him.
At first it was fear. Then habit. Then… she simply stopped drifting away. She walked beside him, sat near him during meals, searched for his gaze whenever someone spoke in the local tongue, waiting for him to translate tone, gesture, invisible threat.
It began to grow… complicated.
Especially at night.
The shelter was small: stone walls, leather blankets, a central fire that never warmed enough. The cold forced shared body heat—a common practice among villagers, entirely alien to the social norms they had left behind.
The first night she lay beside him, Adrián assumed it was temporary.
The second, that it was fear.
The third… he stopped rationalizing it.
Nara slept deeply, exhausted by tension, illness narrowly avoided, and accumulated grief. She curled beneath the hides, seeking warmth. Stability. Something that would not vanish while she slept.
Adrián did not sleep the same way.
He felt her breathing against his shoulder, the subtle weight when the cold pushed her closer, the scent of smoke and leather replacing whatever perfume she might once have worn.
He closed his eyes.
And thought.
You don't put meat in front of a starving wolf.
The thought stirred an uncomfortable mixture of irony and guilt.
He wasn't a saint. Never had been. His life had been shaped by cold decisions, transactional relationships, desires he rarely allowed to interfere with his objectives.
But this was different.
Nara wasn't there out of desire.
She was there because she was broken.
And that made any temptation dangerous—not just for her.
For him.
The trees thinned beneath a gray-washed sky.
And then they saw it.
The city rose from the landscape like an old wound. Not monumental. Not radiant. Built of dark stone and reinforced timber; irregular walls that looked torn down and rebuilt countless times. Watchtowers pierced the skyline like blackened fangs, and gray smoke columns climbed steadily from within.
It was ugly.
It was hard.
But it was alive.
Relief moved through the column like a silent current.
They had arrived.
Unlike the settlement they had left behind, this was not a fragile refuge against Eldoria's chaos.
It was a statement of power.
Where there were walls, there was order.
Where there were soldiers, there was hierarchy.
And where hierarchy existed…
There were rules.
Meanwhile, in the north—
The wind did not blow.
It roared.
It descended from the mountains like an invisible beast, tearing palm roofs free and shaking the settlement's pillars. The sky churned slowly above the valley, thick clouds turning as if the world itself were being stirred.
Drums pounded in desperation.
Not for war.
For survival.
The shaman raised his bone staff.
"It has returned. The Sky Devourer has awakened."
The wind stopped.
Silence fell like a slab of stone.
Then the sky tore open.
A colossal silhouette emerged: wings of condensed mist, a body of lightning trapped in feline form, eyes blazing like living storms.
The Tempest Jaguar descended.
Huts collapsed beneath air pressure. Spears passed through its form without resistance.
Lightning struck.
Three hunters vanished in white light.
From the jungle slope, Kael watched.
The key embedded in his chest vibrated. Runes flared, projecting meaning directly into his mind:
Climatic entity. Territorial guardian. Weak point: electrical core upon materialization.
Kael adjusted his folding spear and began descending.
He did not run.
He walked.
The Jaguar lunged toward trapped children.
Kael leapt from a collapsed roof, landing between them and the beast, driving the spear into the ground to absorb the impact. Stone cracked beneath his boots.
"Back."
The Jaguar hesitated.
Then attacked.
The storm erupted. Kael rolled, narrowly avoiding claws of pure electricity. He forced the creature to solidify in pursuit.
The key burned.
The runes flared.
The Jaguar's body solidified for a heartbeat.
Kael moved.
He vaulted a fallen wall and hurled the spear straight into the beast's chest.
Lightning detonated within.
The roar shook the valley as the creature fractured into wild currents. Kael sprinted, ripped free his blade, and drove it into the luminous core.
A final scream tore across the sky.
Then silence.
The wind dispersed. The clouds parted. The creature collapsed into sparks that died before touching the earth.
The survivors emerged slowly.
The shaman approached, leaning on his staff.
"You are not of this world."
The key glowed.
Kael answered in their language. Perfect. Unaccented.
"Maybe not. But I can help yours survive."
The old man trembled.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
Behind him, the warriors knelt.
Not before a conqueror.
But before someone who had faced the sky—
And forced it to retreat.